Darpa sees 'upside' benefits in analog

Darpa’s budget for the UPSIDE program won’t be disclosed until the
solicitation phase is completed. Darpa’s initial goal is to encourage
participation by science and technology-based firms and educational
institutions.

No companies or organizations have yet been
enlisted to work on the analog program. Darpa said it has had
discussions with a number of groups, both in academia and industry to
lay the ground work for the program. Based on those discussions, analog
technologies are available for ISR applications but needed further
development, Hammerstrom said.

“Darpa saw this as an opportunity
to change the paradigm of computation with the UPSIDE program,
particularly in the area of image processing, which is critical to the
DoD,” he said. The agency thinks there are “many potential participants
that we have not talked to who could contribute to the UPSIDE program.”

Probabilistic
technology is not new, and some analog chip companies may already be
exploring its benefits. Analog Devices Inc. [Norwood, Mass.], for
instance, last year acquired Lyric Semiconductor, a privately held
company that was described as having developed “an innovative set of
techniques with the potential to achieve an order of magnitude
improvement in power efficiency in mixed-signal processing and enable
additional signal processing functionality in a broad set of
applications.”

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